By Gordon Hull
Last time, I followed up on a reference in Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code to Foucault’s short text “Message ou bruit” (1966). Here I want to trace out some of the political implications of that text, or at least to suggest a path from it to some of his later work in the 1970s and current forms of political resistance.
One of Foucault’s emergent interests in philosophy of language is in pragmatics and speech act theory. I don’t know enough about his reading in the relevant time period to know if this exactly tracks his growing interest in politics, but by a 1978 lecture in Japan (which I discussed here) he is able to say that:
“Perhaps one could see that there is still a certain possibility for philosophy to play a role in relation to power, which would be a role neither of foundation nor of renewal of power. Perhaps philosophy can still play a role on the side of counter-power, on the condition that this role does not consist in exercising, in the face of power, the very law of philosophy, on the condition that philosophy stops thinking of itself as prophesy, on the condition that philosophy stops thinking of itself either as pedagogy, or as legislation, and that it gives itself the task to analyse, clarify, and make visible, and thus intensify the struggles that develop around power, the strategies of the antagonists within relations of power, the tactics employed, the foyers of resistance, on the condition in sum that philosophy stops posing the question of power in terms of good and bad, but rather poses it in terms of existence. The question is not: is power good or bad, legitimate or illegitimate, a question of right or morality? Rather, one should simply try to relieve the question of power of all the moral and juridical overloads that one has placed on it, and ask the following naïve question, which has not been posed so often, even if a certain number of people have actually posed it for a long while: what do power relations fundamentally consist in?” (192)
Foucault’s emphases here – from the emphasis on local struggles to the rejection of prophetic thinking – should be familiar. He then immediately suggests that “We have known for a long time that the role of philosophy is not to discover what is concealed, but rather to make visible what precisely is visible, which is to say to make appear what is so close, so immediate, so intimately connected with ourselves that we cannot perceive it.” This is recognizable as a reference to Wittgenstein – specifically, the remark in Philosophical Investigations 128 that “the work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.”
That this is Foucault’s intent is evident in that he immediately suggests that “close to us we have a certain model of a similar usage of philosophy in Anglo-American analytic philosophy” and that:
“In a similar manner, I think we could imagine a philosophy that would have as its task the analysis of what ordinarily happens in power relations, a philosophy that would seek to show what these relations of power are about, what their forms, stakes, and objectives are. As a result, a philosophy that would address the relations of power rather than the games of language, a philosophy that would address all these relations which traverse the social body rather than the effects of language which traverse and underlie our thought.” (192)
The frame of reference here seems clearly to be Wittgenstein and Austin/Searle, given Foucault’s other references to their work. The point of such work is to think about resistance, and in particular how resistance manifests itself without being under the banner of “revolution:”
“It seems to me that the role of such an analytic philosophy of power should be to gauge the importance of these struggles and phenomena, which up to now have been granted just a marginal value. One should show how these processes, these unrests, these obscure, limited, and often modest struggles are different from the forms of struggle that have been so strongly valorised in the Western world under the mark of revolution.” (196).
The Japan lecture is given in 1978; it is thus contemporary with Foucault’s Iran writings. In an interview with Baqir Parham, he notes his interest in “those who struggle to present a different way of thinking about social and political organization, one that takes nothing from Western philosophy, from its juridical and revolutionary foundations” (186). In a later interview comment on Iran, he carefully distinguishes what he is seeing there from a “revolution:”
“It is not a revolution, not in the literal sense of the term, not a way of standing up and straightening things out. It is the insurrection of men with bare hands who want to lift the fearful weight, the weight of the entire world order that bears down on each of us, but more specifically on them, these oil workers and peasants at the frontiers of empires. It is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane” (222)
Foucault’s Iran writings are obviously too much to take on here; I reference them only to indicate that his interest in a certain kind of linguistic philosophy is relevant to his interest in political resistance, and in rethinking political resistance along lines that depart from Marxist emphasis on “revolutions” and all of the baggage those entail.
In Code, Geoghegan emphasizes that in Baudrillard, “what ultimately allied his critique [the reference is to his System of Objects] with that of the crypto-structuralists, rather than with that of his [Marxist] advisor Henri Lefebvre, was his insistence on communicative immanence: there was no outside to codes” (167). It seems clear enough that this is part of Foucault’s point about power; what I would emphasize here is that you can get there through the signal/noise relation. That is, one form of resistance to power and communication (etc) is the attempt to inject noise in code. I will briefly note three examples:
(1) Donna Haraway uses almost exactly these terms in her “Cyborg Manifesto.” That text deserves a close rereading; here let me just underscore that she notes that “communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move – the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange” (Simians, Cyborgs, 164, emphasis original). This means that theory needs to change away from revolutionary language (“the feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one” (173)). This suggests a politics for resistance:
“Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics must insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine” (176).
Given that I’m discussing this in the context of a book on 1960s French theory, it would be remiss not to note the Derridean overtones to the passage, given his own insistence on writing and the inability to perfectly transmit meaning through it.
(2) Current practices of culture jamming like the Billboard Liberation Front or the “Walocaust” imagery demonstrate the use of noise to disrupt corporate branding. Corporations do not like this! They fight back with Trademark and other efforts to stop “dilution” of their brand, though it should be noted that Wal-Mart’s efforts to stop the Walocaust site ultimately failed. Speaking of these and other forms of “semiotic disobedience,” Sonia Katyal notes that “Given the power elevation of the corporation within public life, it is no surprise that, for many activists, the ultimate authoritarian regime – ripe for subversion – comprises the law of property and intellectual property” (502). In this sort of noise-making, the transgression of private property and proprietization more generally is key:
“In each example, an individual actively transgresses the private, sovereign boundary of corporate property – a billboard, a domain name, an identity, a tangible product – and transforms it into a sort of ‘public’ property open for dialogue and discussion, an entity that is non-sovereign, borderless, and thus incapable of excluding alternative meanings” (506-7)
That is:
“I use the term ‘semiotic disobedience’ to purposefully capture two overlapping elements: authorial disobedience – referring to the creation of texts that consciously diverge from the original meaning intended by an author and proprietary disobedience – referring to the willingness of these artists and activists to challenge the boundaries of property protections” (507).
(3) There are also technological examples of noise. One, which is not at all controversial, is differential privacy, which makes it impossible to know if a given person is represented in a dataset by the strategic addition of noise. Differential privacy is not (pace its advocates) a panacea; as Os Keyes and Kathleen Creel note, the solution is limited by its understanding of the problem:
“Formal privacy measures like differential privacy do not measure the size of the dataset created, the number of people exposed if the data were to leak, or the concentration of access to the database. As such, formal privacy temporarily protects individual privacy without changing the fundamental risks and power imbalances of the system. While it may help some knowers to be represented in the system without exposing them to extractive data use, it does not otherwise change whose knowledge is represented or whose questions can be answered” (9)
That doesn’t mean that differential privacy is useless; it means that its political meaning is dependent on the context in which it is used. The only point to note here is that it is the explicit use of noise to disrupt a decoding operation, and operation that depends on the decipherability of code.
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Foucault isn’t really directly political until the 1970s, so whatever political meaning one can draw from his 1960s remarks is embryonic here. But it does seem to be reasonable to chart a path from the way Levi-Strauss ends Savage Mind by suggesting “an epochal reordering of Western culture in which all its familiar landmarks – science, objectivity, humankind, religion – would undergo transformations through the recognition accorded by processes such as decolonization” (Geoghegan, Code, 151) – through to Foucault’s invocation of noise and then to his well-known elevation of subjugated knowledges at the start of Society must be Defended and his rethinking of resistance without revolution. From there, it is not hard to see a constellation with more direct forms of biopolitical resistance today.
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